LTU STEM Center (Update: Crain's Detroit Business Magazine)

August 25, 2013 8:00 AM

$20M gift to LTU a STEM-winder Alumni donors to help boost $55M complex

By Chad Halcom

ANTHONY BARCHOCK

Stephen Brown, vice president for university advancement at Lawrence Technological University (left), and university President Virinder K. Moudgil say hundreds of alumni have donated to the new complex on its Southfield campus.

The largest alumni cash gift in the history of Lawrence Technological University gives new legs to its plans for a $55 million complex — and accelerates the 81-year-old school's work on that project and efforts to attract more students to engineering and science careers.

About half of the $20 million gift, announced last week, will go toward building the revised A. Alfred Taubman Engineering, Life Sciences and Architecture Complex with a newly added Dr. Richard E. Marburger STEM Center.

The Southfield-based engineering, design and management university is working with its architect to see how the new center adjusts the building's layout and project cost, said university President Virinder Moudgil.

The $20 million gift comes from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous, the university said.

The proposed Marburger center expands on programs Lawrence Tech offers to attract middle and high school students into careers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics — commonly known as STEM. Marburger was the fourth president of Lawrence Tech, from 1977 to 1993.

And, Moudgil said, some of that STEM program expansion could begin as early as the winter semester — before any construction starts on the Taubman complex in 2014.

"A year from now, we'll put the shovel in the ground, and the first phase will be complete in 2015," Moudgil said. "But the beauty of this gift is, we don't have to wait for that. The process of the education can start almost right away. And as people learn and inquire about participating in it, we can start offering more instruction."

The new gift — all donors to the complex have been undisclosed since retail pioneer Taubman's original $11 million seed gift for it in 2011 — will go toward equipment and training space in robotics, software engineering, modeling, medical simulations, computer-assisted molecular modeling and other specialty equipment systems in the STEM center.

It also puts the university at between $30 million and $35 million raised for the complex. Hundreds of alumni have contributed, including about a dozen "significant" gifts since Taubman's first pledge, said Moudgil and Stephen Brown, vice president of university advancement.

A large portion of the new gift is earmarked to fund need-based scholarships at LTU and does not count toward the STEM center or cost of the building.

The university hopes to fund all three phases of construction through philanthropy, Brown said, but more than 55 percent of the major donor gifts to date are either estate or planned gifts. Shovels break ground next summer, and the new cash gift comes in installments over three years.

"If the groundbreaking were tomorrow, we'd have a problem. We still have work to do, but donor efforts are continuing," said Brown, who hopes to have at least $15 million in cash in hand from fundraising once construction starts.

The architect on the project is Thom Mayne, founder of the architectural and design firm Morphosis, which has offices in New York City and Culver City, Calif.

Lawrence Tech is also $96 million along toward a new stretch goal of $100 million in its capital campaign, launched six years ago. In addition to the $55 million, 125,000-square-foot complex, the campaign is raising $35 million worth of endowments and scholarships, plus $10 million for academics and program innovation.

"We have many pending asks that we still need to close. The building cost is to be fully funded through philanthropy," Moudgil said. "And it will add some to our operating costs, but we expect that to be offset by a larger number of students. We are not going to raise tuition simply to have this development."

This spring, Lawrence Tech unveiled preliminary plans for the 125,000-square-foot STEM center. Moudgil said plans probably will see some changes over the next few months.

The STEM center was one of many proposals the development staff had solicited to alumni, and the latest donor took an interest in that during discussions this year, Brown said.

The university, which has 4,500 students, probably will add "a few hundred" more students after the first phase of construction wraps up in 2015 and eventually should grow to about 6,000 when the expansion is complete, Moudgil said.

The university last month also received an in-kind software grant from Plano, Texas-based Siemens PLM Software, with an estimated $40 million commercial value, to aid in product design.

LTU’s Biggest Gift Ever, $20M, Will Create STEM Center

August 19, 2013 7:32 PM

Lawrence Technological University’s Southfield campus

SOUTHFIELD (WWJ) – Lawrence Technological University has received a $20 million gift to support its “Proud Heritage, Bold Future” capital campaign. It is the largest cash gift in the 4,500-student private university’s 81-year history.

The gift will be used to help fund the planned Richard E. Marburger STEM Center, which will support existing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs at LTU and introduce new programs.

Marburger was the university’s fourth president from 1977 to 1993 and remains active on campus as he approaches his 50th anniversary of service to the university.

The donor, meanwhile, wishes to be anonymous.

“This is a transformational contribution that provides Lawrence Tech an unprecedented opportunity to advance several long-term goals at the same time,” said LTU President Virinder Moudgil. “The university has plans in place for exciting new educational initiatives and can now move ahead to enhance its leadership position in delivering cutting-edge education in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”

Educational areas to be supported by the proposed Marburger STEM Center include robotics; software engineering; modeling, simulation and visualization; nanotechnology; medical simulations and informatics; computer-assisted molecular modeling; synthetic biology; “green” chemistry; and design thinking.

The Marburger STEM Center will also support academic programming in sustainable design, energy systems, architectural engineering, game art and game design, media communication, transportation and industrial design, digital humanities, digital marketing, and mathematics.

A new cross-disciplinary learning environment will increase training and instructional resources for the LTU faculty. New faculty members would lead the integration of technologies and experiential learning into curricula and research.

A significant portion of the gift will also fund need-based scholarships at LTU in order to improve accessibility to higher education.

The gift is also a major step toward reaching LTU’s capital campaign goal of $100 million, which has raised $76 million over the previous six years. The three main targets for the capital campaign are:
• Facilities and infrastructure, $55 million.
• Endowment and scholarships, $35 million.
• Academics and program innovation, $10 million.

“This remarkable gift allows Lawrence Tech to accelerate its progress in becoming a national leader in STEM education and improving the educational experiences and outcomes for our students,” Moudgil said. “Continuously improving the University’s quality and service is paramount. We are extremely grateful.”

This spring Lawrence Tech unveiled preliminary plans for the 125,000-square-foot A. Alfred Taubman Engineering, Life Sciences, and Architecture Complex that is expected to cost $55 million. Construction is expected to start next year and a portion of the gift will help provide new learning facilities in that building.

In July, LTU received the largest in-kind software grant in its history with a commercial value of $40 million from Siemens PLM Software. The in-kind grant gives LTU students access to the same technology that companies around the world use every day to develop innovative products that are engineered for manufacturability in a wide variety of industries including automotive, aerospace, defense, machinery, medical, high-tech, electronics and many more.

Lawrence Technological University, http://www.ltu.edu, is a private university founded in 1932 that offers more than 100 programs through the doctoral level in its Colleges of Architecture and Design,Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Management. PayScale lists Lawrence Tech among the nation’s top 7 percent of universities for return on undergraduate tuition investment, and highest in the Detroit metropolitan area. Lawrence Tech is also listed in the top tier of Midwestern universities by U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review. Activities on Lawrence Tech’s 102-acre campus include over 60 student clubs and organizations and a growing roster of NAIA varsity sports.

ON NOISE & DISTRACTIONS to THINKING (Add Ubiquitous Cell Phone & Social Media)

New york times OPINION

I’m Thinking. Please. Be Quiet.

Tommi Musturi

By GEORGE PROCHNIK

Published: August 24, 2013

SLAMMING doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s existence. But it was only in later middle age, after he had moved with his beloved poodle to the commercial hub of Frankfurt, that his sense of being tortured by loud, often superfluous blasts of sound ripened into a philosophical diatribe. Then, around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker.

His argument against noise was simple: A great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point. Just as a mighty army becomes useless if its soldiers are scattered helter-skelter, a great mind becomes ordinary the moment its energies are dispersed.

And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared, adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.

From the vantage point of our own auditory world, with its jets, jackhammers, HVAC systems, truck traffic, cellphones, horns, decibel-bloated restaurants and gyms on acoustical steroids, Schopenhauer’s mid-19th century complaints sound almost quaint. His biggest gripe of all was the “infernal cracking” of coachmen’s whips. (If you think a snapping line of rawhide’s a problem, buddy, try the Rumbler Siren.) But if noise did shatter thought in the past, has more noise in more places further diffused our cognitive activity?

Schopenhauer made a kind of plea for mono-tasking. Environmental noise calls attention to itself — splits our own attention, regardless of willpower. We jerk to the tug of noise like sonic marionettes. There’s good reason for this. Among mammals, hearing developed as an early warning system; the human ear derived from the listening apparatus of very small creatures. Their predators were very big, and there were many of them.

Mammalian hearing developed primarily as an animal-detector system — and it was crucial to hear every rustle from afar. The evolved ear is an extraordinary amplifier. By the time the brain registers a sound, our auditory mechanism has jacked the volume several hundredfold from the level at which the sound wave first started washing around the loopy whirls of our ears. This is why, in a reasonably quiet room, we actually can hear a pin drop. Think what a tiny quantity of sound energy is released by a needle striking a floor! Our ancestors needed such hypersensitivity, because every standout noise signified a potential threat.

There has been a transformation in our relationship to the environment over the millions of years since the prototype for human hearing evolved, but part of our brain hasn’t registered the makeover.

Every time a siren shrieks on the street, our conscious minds might ignore it, but other brain regions behave as if that siren were a predator barreling straight for us. Given how many sirens city dwellers are subject to over the course of an average day, and the attention-fracturing tension induced by loud sounds of every sort, it’s easy to see how sensitivity to noise, once an early warning system for approaching threats, has become a threat in itself.

Indeed, our capacity to tune out noises — a relatively recent adaptation — may itself pose a danger, since it allows us to neglect the physical damage that noise invariably wreaks. A Hyena (Hypertension and Exposure to Noise Near Airports) study published in 2009 examined the effects of aircraft noise on sleeping subjects. The idea was to see what effect noise had, not only on those awakened by virtual fingernails raking the blackboard of the night sky, but on the hardy souls who actually slept through the thunder of overhead jets.

The findings were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days.

As Dr. Wolfgang Babisch, a lead researcher in the field, observed, there is no physiological habituation to noise. The stress of audible assault affects us psychologically even when we don’t consciously register noise.

In American culture, we tend to regard sensitivity to noise as a sign of weakness or killjoy prudery. To those who complain about sound levels on the streets, inside their homes and across a swath of public spaces like stadiums, beaches and parks, we say: “Suck it up. Relax and have a good time.” But the scientific evidence shows that loud sound is physically debilitating. A recent World Health Organization report on the burden of disease from environmental noise conservatively estimates that Western Europeans lose more than one million healthy life years annually as a consequence of noise-related disability and disease. Among environmental hazards, only air pollution causes more damage.

A while back, I was interviewed on a call-in radio station serving remote parts of Newfoundland. One caller lived in a village with just a few houses and almost no vehicular traffic. Her family had been sitting in the living room one evening when the power suddenly cut off. They simultaneously exhaled a sigh of relief. All at once, the many electronic devices around them (including the refrigerator, computers, generator, lamps and home entertainment systems and the unnatural ambient hum they generated and to which the family had become oblivious) went silent. The family members didn’t realize until the sound went off how loud it had become. Without knowing it, each family member’s mental energy was constantly diverted by and responsive to the threat posed by that sound.

Where does this leave those of us facing less restrained barrages? Could a critical mass of sound one day be reached that would make sustained thinking impossible?

Is quiet a precondition of democracy? The Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter suggested it might just be. “The men whose labors brought forth the Constitution of the United States had the street outside Independence Hall covered with earth so that their deliberations might not be disturbed by passing traffic,” he once wrote. “Our democracy presupposes the deliberative process as a condition of thought and of responsible choice by the electorate.”

The quiet in Independence Hall was not the silence of a monastic retreat, but one that encouraged listening to others and collaborative statesmanship; it was a silence that made them more receptive to the sound of the world around them.

Most likely Schopenhauer had in mind a similar sense of quiet when he chose to live in a big city rather than retiring from society: apparently he, too, believed it important to observe as much of life as possible. And when he moved to Frankfurt, he didn’t bring earplugs. He brought along a poodle known to bark on occasion, and the flute he loved to play after writing. Most people who are seeking more serenity from the acoustical environment aren’t asking for the silence of the tomb. We just believe we should be able to hear ourselves think.

Below: Additional Submission by Leo Tomkow

Michigan Schools Scorecard (Update: Confused by Coloring Outside of the Lines?)

Some school leaders blast Mich. scorecard ratings

By Lori Higgins and Kristi Tanner Detroit Free Press Staff Writers

   A new accountability system launched Tuesday for Michigan schools shows many have a long way to go to meet ambitious goals set by the state — with most schools and districts earning a mark that indicates they are in need of improvement.

   The Michigan School Accountability Scorecards is a new system for holding schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

   Schools and districts are assigned one of five colors — green, lime green, yellow, orange and red — based on how well they meet goals, with the color green being best and red being worst. The majority of schools in the state — 2,605 —got a yellow.

   The fact that few schools earned a top rating, many top-performing schools were identified as needing improvement, and most schools and districts earned a yellow drew mixed reactions.

   “The system is fatally flawed,” said Steve Matthews, superintendent in the Novi School District.

   State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said in a statement Tuesday that the system provides a diagnostic tool that gives schools, districts, parents and the public an easy way to identify strengths and weak- nesses.

   “It provides greater transparency and detail on multiple levels of school performance,” Flanagan said.

   “We now have new goals to reach and we will,” said Danelle Gittus, spokeswoman for Oakland Schools, the intermediate school district for Oakland County.

   The data show that most schools may struggle to meet the state’s eventual goal that 85% of students be proficient by the 2021-22 school year. And it also shows that many schools are struggling with certain groups of students.

   Of the 3,397 schools that received a color, only 96 got a green and few of them were schools that consistently post top test scores. And nearly half of that 96 — many of them charter schools — did not earn their green status because of promising scores on state exams. Most are new schools open only a year that were given the green status because they tested more than 95% of their students and because they complied with nonacademic requirements, such as filing an annual report. Others got a green for having a high attendance rate.

   A bulk of schools and districts — 77% and 69% respectively — earned a yellow.

   Of the 511 schools that re ceived a red color, 443 were traditional public schools and 68 were charter schools.

   Venessa Keesler, a deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education, said last week that a yellow doesn’t mean a school is average. Yellow, she said, “is caution.”

   On Tuesday, she told reporters during a conference call that many schools struggled because they now have to be accountable for a new group of students — the lowest-achieving 30%.

   It indeed is difficult to get past a yellow score, based on the complicated formula the state uses to determine what a school has earned. Earning a green color “is extremely difficult,” said Judy Pritchett, chief academic officer for the Ma-comb Intermediate School District.

   A school or district earns a color based on the number of points it amasses — two points for each goal met, one point for each goal met by demonstrating improvement, and zero points if the goal isn’t met.

   A school must earn 85% or more of the points possible to get a green. The number of points schools can collect varies from school to school, and depends largely on how many populations of subgroups — based on racial, economic, English-speaking ability, special- education status — a school has.

   A school’s overall performance could earn it a green color. But a number of factors can drop that color down to a yellow, said Chris Janzer, director of the office of evaluation, strategic research and accountability at the MDE. For instance, if a school’s economically disadvantaged students fail to meet the academic goals, the best color a school can earn is a yellow. The same is the case if two of its subgroups don’t meet the requirement that 95% of students be tested.

   Matthews, the Novi superintendent, said the colors appear to have little to do with actual performance. He said a school with high test scores — even among its subgroups of students — could be rated lower than a school with lower test scores simply because it has more subgroups to be responsible for.

   “Each parent is now, as we speak, looking at the color of their school and comparing it to the color of other schools. Parents will assume incorrectly that schools with orange are worse than schools with yellow and that schools within yellow are all the same,” Matthews said. “It is not true.”

   Gittus said the new system is a better representation than an A-F system that some other states have adopted.

   “It takes into account a lot of different factors. Saying that your district is an A versus an F has a certain connotation that goes with it that we don’t think is fair,” Gittus said.

   The new accountability system replaces a key provision of the No Child Left Behind law that required states to identify whether a school met adequate yearly progress — based on test scores, test score improvement, graduation rates and attendance rates. The law had what many believe was an unrealistic goal that every student be proficient in reading and math by the end of the 2013-14 school year.

   The color-coded system is a better system in that respect because instead of everyone having to hit the same target, it “takes schools from where they are and recognizes progress year over year in a range where it’s realistic to think that they might be able to make such progress,” said Robert Floden, co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.

   State education officials said they hope the new system will provide parents and the community with more useful information to help them gauge how well a school is doing. But it may take time for people used to the old system to learn how to effectively use the new, state officials say.

MDE RELEASES ANNUAL SCHOOL RANKINGS

   The Michigan Department of Education also released its annual top-to-bottom ranking of schools, as well as lists of the worst-performing schools in the state, schools with large achievement gaps, and schools considered “reward” schools because they’re top-rated, beating the odds or have shown significant improvement The state list shows 137 schools labeled “priority” schools because they’re the lowest-ranked; 349 “focus” schools that have large achievement gaps and 342 “reward” schools. Priority schools must come under the supervision of the state school reform officer at the MDE and file an improvement plan. Focus schools may have to set aside some federal funding to help narrow the gaps. Detroit Public Schools, the state’s largest district, had 25 schools on the priority list, down from 36 last year. Some schools improved enough to come off the list, but are still following their turnaround plan, said Steve Wasko, spokesman for DPS. He said the district attributes the schools coming off the lists to consistent instruction, monitoring implementation of the academic plan, using data from assessments and ensuring the best teacher is in front of all students.

GREEN SCHOOLS IN METRO DETROIT

   What does it mean to be green? Nearly 100 schools statewide were assigned a green as part of the Michigan School Accountability Scorecards. Green is the highest rating a school can get, but of the 24 metro Detroit schools that got a green, nine of them (noted with an asterisk) only got a green for meeting non-academic factors such as attendance rates, testing at least 95% of their students, and/or for complying with other requirements such as filing an annual report.

   Macomb › Noor International Academy, charter school › Forest Park Elementary, East Detroit School District › Crescentwood Elementary, East Detroit School District Oakland › Oxford Virtual Academy, Oxford Community Schools › Edison MAX Day Treatment, Hazel Park School District › Novi Adult Education, Novi Community Schools › Kennedy Center, Pontiac School District Wayne › Crestwood Accelerated Program, Crestwood School District › University Prep Science/Math High, charter school › Beech Elementary, Redford Union School District › Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, charter school* › Regent Park Scholars Charter Academy, charter school › South Canton Scholars Charter Academy, charter school › Benjamin Carson School for Science and Medicine, Detroit Public Schools* › Starr Detroit Academy, charter school* › Detroit Innovation Academy, charter school* › Cornerstone Health School, charter school* › Henry Ford Academy: School for Creative Studies: Elementary, charter school* › Madison-Carver Academy, charter school* › Plymouth Scholars Charter Academy, charter school* › Caniff Liberty Academy, charter school* › Webster Elementary School, Livonia Public Schools › Winans Academy High School, charter school › Hope of Detroit Academy Consortium High School, charter school

METRO DETROIT SCHOOLS IN 99TH PERCENTILE

   Each year the Michigan Department of Education issues a top-to-bottom ranking of schools — based largely on test scores, test score improvement and other factors such as graduation rates. Here are the Wayne, Oakland and Macomb schools ranked at the 99th percentile, the top ranking in the state. The 99th percentile rank indicates these schools perform better than 99% of the schools in the state.

   Oakland › Leonard Elementary School, Troy School District › Schroeder Elementary School, Troy School District › University Hills Elementary School, Rochester Community Schools › Van Hoosen Middle School, Rochester Community Schools › Bemis Elementary School, Troy School District › Musson Elementary School, Rochester Community Schools Wayne › Crestwood Accelerated Program, Crest-wood School District › Webster Elementary School, Livonia Public Schools› Brownell Middle School, Grosse Pointe Public Schools › Henry Ford Early College, Dearborn Public Schools

Michigan Schools Accountability Scorecard System Debuts (Update: The Michigan Department of Education)

HOLDING SCHOOLS ACCOUNTABLE

Scorecard system to measure progress

New method features 5 colors to track goals met

By Lori Higgins Detroit Free Press Education Writer

   Parents, get ready for a brand new look at how well your child’s school is doing.

   The Michigan Department of Education on Tuesday is to debut a new system for holding schools accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law, issuing scorecards for every school and district. State officials hope this will provide parents and the community a more clear picture of school progress.

   “It’s more fine-grained and more detailed information,” said Venessa Keesler, deputy superintendent for education services at the MDE.

   State officials hope the new Michigan School Accountability Scorecards is a more intuitive, color-coded system that will assign one of five colors — green, lime green, yellow, orange or red — to each school or district. The color green is best, and it means most of the goals were met. Red, meaning a school met few of the goals and needs intervention, is worst.

   A school earns a color based on the number of points it amasses — two points for each goal met, , one point for each goal met by demonstrating improvement, and zero points if the goal isn’t met at all. Schools that earn 85% or more of the points possible are assigned a green color. To get lime green, they have to earn 70% to 84% of their points; yellow, 60% to 69%; orange, 50% to 59%; and red, below 50%.

   One of the biggest changes in the accountability system is the way the goals are set. Instead of the old No Child Left Behind (NCLB) practice of expecting all schools to meet the gan has set individual goals for each school and district — with the expectation that they’ll show incremental growth over the next 10 school years. The eventual goal is that 85% of students be proficient by the 2021-22 school year.

   The individual goals provide “tailored, customized targets that relate to where students are starting and where they need to get,” Keesler said.

   But parents used to one system for the last decade may have a difficult time this first year understanding the new scorecards, said Judy Pritchett, chief academic officer for the Macomb Intermediate School District.

   “I’m concerned that parents won’t get it,” Pritchett said.

   Keesler acknowledged the potential confusion, saying the MDE is committed to spending time in the next year working with parents, teachers and school administrators “so they know what’s in there and they know how to use it.”

   The system replaces a key provision of the NCLB law that required states to identify whether a school met adequate yearly progress — based on test scores, test score improvement, graduation rates and attendance rates.

   But that system had flaws. Among them: It was similar to a pass/fail system that provided parents little context to understand why their school did or didn’t meet the standards. It had what many consider to be an unrealistic goal that by the2013-14 school year, all students be proficient in reading and math. And it could take years for tough sanctions to kick in for schools that truly need intervention.

   Under the new system, schools that earn a red will be designated a “priority” school — a label that actually kicked in last year. Those schools immediately come under the supervision of the state’s reform officer and must produce a detailed improvement plan. If they don’t show improvement in turning things around, they potentially could be placed in the Education Achievement Authority, the statewide reform system for the lowest-performing schools in the state.

   Michigan is one of dozens of states that were granted waivers from some of the NCLB rules from the U.S. Department of Education, in exchange for taking steps — such as adopting college and career-ready standards — to demonstrate the state is serious about increasing academic achievement. Among the waivers Michigan asked for was the ability to veer away from the 100% proficiency goal and to count as proficient students who failed state exams but showed significant improvement.

   Contact Lori Higgins: 313-222-6651or lhiggins@freepress.com  

NEW SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEM

   
The Michigan School Accountability Scorecards system includes a host of changes in how schools are being held accountable. Among them:

   › New subgroup. It requires that schools now be accountable for the performance of their lowest 30% academically. The bottom 30% becomes a subgroup along with existing subgroups of students — based on racial, economic, English speaking ability, special-education status — that schools must show academic gains for in addition to all students in a school. The bottom 30% were added to force schools to address achievement gaps between their highest-performing students and lowest-performing students.

   › Proficiency. Schools can now count students as proficient even if they’ve failed the Michigan Educational Assessment Program exam or the Michigan Merit Exam. But in order to count them, the student would have to show significant improvement on the exams.

   › Individualized goals. Schools now have individual academic goals.The previous system required every school to meet the same goal at the same time. The state uses a formula, taking the eventual goal that 85% of students be proficient by the 2021-22 school year, to determine how much improvement a school would have to show in each of the next 10 years to get to that goal. Here’s what the formula would look like for a school that had 65% proficiency during the 2011-12 school year: (85-65)/10=2. That school would need to improve by 2percentage points in each of the next 10 years, starting with a goal of 67% proficiency for the 2012-13 school year.

   › Educator evaluations now count. Schools and districts now can earn points for complying with state requirements that student growth on exams be used in educator evaluations.

Under the new system, the state has set individual goals for each school and district. KATHLEEN GALLIGAN/DETROIT FREE PRESS

LINKEDIN (Update:Welcomes High School Students / SMART!)

LINKEDIN TARGETS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS WITH NEW COLLEGE SEARCH TOOL

WITH NEW PROFILES FOR COLLEGES, THE PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING SITE ISN'T JUST FOR MOM AND DAD ANYMORE.

BY: SARAH KESSLER

While Facebook used its clout with college students to expand to older users, LinkedIn seems to be doing the opposite. The company on Monday announced plans to target high school and college students with a new product called University Pages.

A LinkedIn spokesperson called the new Pages "the first step towards a longer vision to help students, parents, and university faculty get a head start on career mapping."

Each school's Page will include college decision-making criteria, such as where a school's alumni work and what they do. Students can connect with alumni and their current classmates. Universities can post updates about upcoming events, virtual tours and news.

NYU Page | Click to enlarge

Schools value such recruiting opportunities enough to pay for them, though LinkedIn is not charging for itsPage service. Some colleges, for instance, pay a startup called Inigral from $10,000 to $50,000 every year to create a closed community of their students within Facebook in hopes that being connected to campus will sway undecided incoming freshmen.

Facebook Schools, which launched last year, is intended to provide similar campus-specific communities. But because LinkedIn already has 200 million professional careers on file, it is in a unique position to provide data about how schools' alumni have moved through their careers and can connect those alumni with each other and students in a professional context.

All schools will soon be able to claim their University Pages. The first 200 universities will launch their pages on September 12.

On the same day, LinkedIn will make its profile pages available to high school students. If University Pages and the company's future efforts in education are successful, the company has an opportunity to bring on board a generation of professionals before they even hit the workplace, and open up a promising line of business in one swipe.